Cracow Indological Studies

Front Matter

2022-12-19

Back Matter

2022-12-19

Introduction

Anna A. Ślączka — 2022-12-19

Transposition and Transformation, Controversy and Discovery. On the Christian Encounter with the Religions of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century India, ed. by Karin Preisendanz and Johanna Buss, Wien: Samlung de Nobili 2021, pp. 243 + XVII + 2

Cezary Galewicz — 2022-12-19

Verbal and Visual Texts of the Rāma Narrative

John Brockington — 2022-12-19

This article examines what we mean by a text: is it verbal (whether written or oral), mental, visual, or a combination? All of these forms are found within the various types of artistic expression centred on the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. I start with the relief sculptures, some of which are centuries early than any extant manuscripts. After a brief comment on the evolution of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa text, I then survey in turn some prestige illustrated Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts, less notable Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts, illustrated manuscripts of the Rāmcaritmānas and other vernacular versions, and sets or series of paintings illustrating the Rāma story (including some single paintings), showing the diverse range of forms it has taken over time and something of the adaptations it has undergone.

Text and Paintings

Gérard Colas — 2022-12-19

The manuscript now preserved as Indien 745 in the Manuscript Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) contains 137 paintings by an Indian artist, each accompanied by an explanation in French. These paintings depict deities and sages in static posture or narrative mode, as well as icons associated with temples. The present contribution forms a preliminary study of this manuscript in our project on South Indian manuscripts with paintings of deities preserved in the BnF.

The Oldest Manuscripts from India and Their Histories

Muntazir Ali — 2022-12-19

This essay examines a copy of the Qur’ān from India, now in the India Office Collections at the British Library. The manuscript, registered as IO Loth 4, belongs to the reasonably large group of early Qur’āns that date to the eighth and ninth centuries CE. While some of these manuscripts have charted histories, what is not widely known is that early Qur’āns also made their way to India. There they have their own special histories, meanings and associations. In attempt to address the long ‘after-life’ of these manuscripts, this paper will examine a single example that arrived in India in the Mughal period and was eventually presented to the Library of the East India House by Lord Dalhousie in 1853. While not the earliest of the Qur’āns brought to India, it nonetheless dates to the circa ninth century CE, making it older than any surviving manuscripts in Sanskrit or Prakrit in India proper.

About Visual Language, Drunken Women, Jesters and Escaping the World

Monika Zin — 2022-12-19

Visual communication employs language different than literature. The economy of viewing calls for elements of representation familiar to the viewer, which, when shown in a recurring order, become comprehensible. For us, recognising these elements is often difficult as they can be entirely absent from the literary text. The person of the jester, whose appearance corresponds to the vidūṣaka of the Nāṭyaśāstra, is found frequently in narrative scenes depicted through visual means. His presence often indicates that another figure in the picture is about to withdraw from worldly life. The jester then expresses utter disapproval of his master’s decision. The viewer is able to recognise the meaning of the scene because the jester is shown also in erotic and humorous scenes, perhaps representative of the sensual atmosphere of theatre life, or related to the nāyaka and the vidūṣaka of the Kāmasūtra.

Some Observations on Vārāhī in Bihar and Bengal

Claudine Bautze-Picron — 2022-12-19

The sheer intensity of the encounter between the Buddhist and Hindu pantheons in ‘Eastern India’ (comprising the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and present Bangladesh) from the 7th to the 12th century, was unmatched in any other region.1 It left, above all, a visual and textual trail in the Buddhist iconography, as attested by the presence of two Mātṛkas (Mothers) among the members of Māra’s army attacking the Buddha on the night of his Awakening, Brahmanical deities being incorporated into the Buddhist world: Vārāhī appears in the Jagdishpur sculpture, and Cāmuṇḍā in a large fragment from a sculpture which must have been as large as the Jagdishpur image and used to stand in Lakhisarai, more fragments of it being preserved in the Indian Museum (Fig. 1).2 Further, the key component of Vārāhī iconography,3 the hog head, became an integral part of the images of Buddhist deities like Mārīcī and Vajravārāhī. The cultural background within which the images of the goddess were incorporated helps to understand this twofold phenomenon, the representation of her being transferred to a Buddhist context and some of her specific features being embedded in the iconography of Buddhist deities.

The Archaeology of Kṛṣṇa at Tiruveḷḷaṟai, a Site for Tamil Poetry in the 7th–9th Centuries

Charlotte Schmid — 2022-12-19

In many of the oldest known sites of the Pāṇḍya country located not far from the Kāverī River in Tamil Nadu, a dual Hindu obedience, Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva, was developed concomitantly. Alongside these Bhakti deities, others are present in these places of communication with the sacred. As stone figures attached to the site and texts evoking the place are the two means used to give form to their deities, one would expect these two mediums to interact, but it is often difficult to correlate them in the Tamil country of the first millennium. This paper aims at exploring such possible relationships at Tiruveḷḷaṟai, the earliest remains of which date to the 8^th c. The site has unique archaeological features, such as a svastika-shaped well and the earliest known depictions of some of Kṛṣṇa’s feats; it inspired hymns of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava devotional corpus, the Divyaprabandham, and offers numerous inscriptions. The link between Śiva, Viṣṇu and local goddesses proves to be as remarkable here as that between texts and archaeology.

Nine Ponds (navatīrthas) of Śrīraṅgam

Marzenna Czerniak-Drożdżowicz — 2022-12-19

Water bodies, being elements of the natural landscape, are often connected with religious holy sites and provide ready examples of a mutual relationship between nature and culture. The present article introduces nine holy ponds—tīrthas of the Śrīraṅgam Raṅganātha temple—each with its characteristic features directly connected with a particular tree, residing deity, resident ṛṣi, and certain boons. Short descriptions of the ponds are given in Chapter 10 of the Sanskrit text, the Śrīraṅgamāhātmya, which praises the glory of the holy place, kṣetra, and constitutes my main source material. Even though the nine ponds play an important role in the religious landscape of the site and the life of the religious community, they have not been studied till now. The article presents descriptions of the tīrthas found in the Śrīraṅgamāhātmya and supplements them with a brief report and some photographic evidence from the field research of 2020.

From the Narratives on Mythical Beasts to the Voicing of Power

Ewa Dębicka-Borek — 2022-12-19

Taking as the case study the Ikkeri Nayakas’ Vīrabhadra temple in Keladi (the current Karnataka state), the paper discusses the potential correlation between the narrative and the image in terms of the temple’s artistic programme and the myths it draws on. With the assumption that the artistic production can serve as a political tool aimed at expressing a ruler’s agenda, our focus is on the depictions of certain hybrid creatures found within the premises of the temple and their multidimensional symbolism attested to in Hindu narratives. Our analysis of the visual and the narrative material against the backdrop of the early history of the temple’s royal patrons suggests that in the centre of their interest, while designing the temple, was the desire to set out their claims to power and present the milieu they lived in.